Colony Survival News

We’re still working on the details of implementing ‘realistic logistics’. As explained in last week’s blog, I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles. When bigger population sizes and larger distances came into play, it became harder to understand and steer the production process. A handful of precise questions regularly appeared in my mind:

• Do my workers waste a large part of their working time walking from their homes to their jobs and back?
  
• Do my workers waste a lot of time idling at their job, because the required resources aren’t available?
  
• Do my workers waste a lot of energy hauling low-value resources from one side of the map to the other, while these resources could have better been produced or processed locally?

In essence, these are all questions of efficiency. And that’s kind of the point. With the introduction of realistic logistics, building an efficient, sensible layout for your colony becomes a lot more important. This should become a fun and engaging challenge, without being frustrating and tedious.

While the automatic transport system in Kingdoms and Castles is very fun, it becomes more unwieldy in the later stages. It still works relatively well in that game, but the planned logistics in CS will involve larger distances and more complex production chains, without the benefits of a clear top-down view. I was deeply concerned that similar automatic systems would become irritating and opaque in CS.

So I was trying to think of a system that would work well in our game. A clear, consistent system that would work for small and large colonies, on both small and long distances. One that would properly handle low-value and high-value items. Suddenly, I had an answer. Value! Money? Worth. Currency. Prices. Something in that direction. All the questions above are questions of value: is crafting time and transport time well spent?

A “Philippus goudgulden” from Dordrecht, source

Let’s describe an example. Imagine we’ve got “Guilders”, coincidentally the pre-Euro Dutch currency with medieval origins. Let’s say the average colonist works 300 seconds in a day and earns 30 Guilders with that labor. In this hypothetical example, a baker only needs wheat to bake bread. This costs the baker 20 seconds, which would translate to 2 Guilders of labor costs.

The baker is situated next to stockpile Food Corner. Wheat is available from three stockpiles. Ten pieces of wheat are carried by one deliverer.

• Stockpile Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time, and the wheat itself costs 5 Guilder.
  
• Stockpile Seaside: 150 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 3 Guilder.
  
• Stockpile Very Fertile: 1000 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 1 Guilder.

I've just written this example and have no ideas which stockpile is most cost-efficient, but some simple math should help us solve this problem.

• Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time for 10 wheat = 3 seconds per wheat = 0.3 Guilders of delivery cost (10 seconds of labor for 1 Guilder) = 0.3 Guilder delivery cost + 5 Guilder wheat cost = 5.3 Guilder total cost
  
• Seaside: 1.5 Guilder delivery cost + 3 Guilder wheat cost = 4.5 Guilder total cost
  
• Very Fertile: 10 Guilder + 1 Guilder = 11 Guilder total cost.

It seems obvious that stockpile Seaside is the most optimal choice. But we’ve haven’t looked at the full picture yet. You, the player, could hand out “contracts”. Imagine you’d pay 7.5 Guilder for one bread. With Seaside wheat (4.5 Guilder) plus the costs of the time of the baker (2 Guilder), the colony would have 6.5 Guilder costs for 7.5 Guilder worth of bread. One Guilder of “profit” for every bread!

But with Next To The Walls wheat, the cost increases to 7.3 Guilder, removing nearly all profits. Last and least, with Very Fertile wheat, there isn’t even a profit: 13 Guilder of costs for every bread.

Next To The Walls wheat should only be used as a last resort, and it doesn’t make any sense to haul Very Fertile wheat across the map. Perhaps making bread at all doesn’t make a lot of sense: what if in a similar timespan, Luxury Meals can be made, worth 20 Guilder for only 5 Guilders of cost? 15 Guilders of profit makes 1 Guilder of profit look a lot less attractive.

On the other hand, the results could be easily changed by some actions from the player. The “contract” for bread could be upped to 15 Guilders per bread, suddenly making even the Very Fertile wheat profitable. Raising the price of a contract would simultaneously raise the price of that product when it's used as an ingredient by colonists. This explains the differences in the price for wheat between the stockpiles from the example.

The player could also improve the transport route from stockpile Very Fertile to stockpile Food Corner, with roads and bridges, a shipping route or rails. If this reduces the transport costs far enough, Very Fertile wheat would become the optimal choice.



The idea isn’t to force players to do all of these calculations. The costs should relate to sensible, in-game things. Everybody understands that placing smelters who need ores close to miners of these ores, reduces the delivery costs of these ores. It makes sense that delivering heavy items is more expensive than delivering small, light items.

The colonists themselves should take the value of the products they are crafting, and the costs of ingredients and delivery, into account when making their choices. This will automatically focus them on doing efficient things, and will stop them from dragging resources across the map without serious benefits. The “Guilder-value” of your actions should be clearly communicated to players, without making managing a spreadsheet the core of your activities.

We hope we can accomplish this, and love to have your opinion and input! To test our ideas, Zun has been building a simple 2D simulation. Last week, I asked whether you wanted to see some footage of the simulation, and there was definitely some interest. I made two short GIFs to showcase its features:
A steady network in action Setting up a network

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Last week, we've shared the results of our survey in regards to implementing realistic logistics. The response was overwhelmingly positive! We’ve also read all the comments on the blogs, and the discussions on our Discord server. There are some opponents, there is some hesitation, but the general mood seems to be one of excitement! We’re very seriously considering implementing realistic logistics.

While the concept allows for a lot of extra features, it’s not without its issues. Making the system completely automatic means you’ve got little control over where items go. Making the system completely manual will be very tedious, and difficult for newcomers. It’ll have to be a mix of automation and manual input, but making this system fun and intuitive to use is quite the challenge.

There are many different kinds of logistics the system has to facilitate. The easy cases to solve are small colonies with clear ‘directions’. Miners produce ores which have to go towards the smelters. Farmers produce crops which have to go towards bakers and cooks.

But this quickly becomes more complicated. Smelters, bakers and cooks all need firewood. What if they’re not all in the same location? What if one group consumes much more firewood than the others?

How about jobs, like the workbench, that create a lot of items with loads of different ingredients? And how do we handle long distance trade? Is there one system for item transport, or are there different systems for logistics within a colony versus logistics between colonies?

Some things we’re strongly considering to combine with realistic logistics are:

[h3]1.) A Reworked World[/h3]

Our current (0.8.1, before realistic logistics) design idea is different useful areas, separated by “useless” terrain.

New World --- Ocean --- “Default Terrain / Spawn” --- Steppe --- Far East

The idea is to start a relatively self-sufficient colony in each unique area, and use it to get all the crops, jobs and ores that are unique to that area.

With the realistic logistics, we’re thinking of a wholly different system. Ores, and other useful things like fertile land (with hopefully a sensible system that makes different pieces of land optimal for different crops), should be spread throughout the world - but not all in the same location. Perhaps your main colony is near a source of fertile land and iron. You’ve got a fishing outpost on the shore, and a mining outpost in the mountains to gather gold and coal. Deep in the woods, you’ve got a small colony that gathers wood and saltpeter.

Instead of the current “magic”, completely UI-based trading, trade should involve physical connections between the colonies. It would be good if you could build actual roads that speed up the colonist walking speed. To indicate trade routes, you could need to build milestones next to the road. For shipping routes, there would be buoys. There would be a primitive map that indicates the location of colonies, major stockpiles and the trade routes between them.

[h3]2.) Streamlined Crafting[/h3]

Currently, lots of items require specific and detailed ingredients. Bows need bow strings, there aren’t merely iron ingots but also wrought iron and iron rivets, lots of things require not merely copper but also copper nails and/or copper tools, etcetera, etcetera. Because of current technical limitations, we can’t let item crafting take more than 15 seconds, so we used these ingredients to allow us to let certain items take a more sensible amount of crafting time.

We intend to remove these technical limitations, and that could also allow us to remove these “cluttering” ingredients. Things would “merely” require ingredients like wood/copper/iron, not specific processed versions of it. That would make implementing a realistic stockpile with logistics easier as well.

This would temporarily reduce item variety, but this would rise again with later updates that add for example industrial content. But these items would work in a similar fashion, with "rubber" being "rubber" and not "rubber piece", "rubber ring", etcetera.



To work out these ideas, we’ve been doing a lot of research and discussion. Zun has been working on a simple 2D simulation that allows us to test some of our ideas. We can include some moving footage in the next blog if there’s interest! I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles on the recommendation of Vobbert and multiple players. That game already includes realistic logistics. It’s a lovely game that works brilliantly, and their system works mostly automatically. I did notice that logistics became a bit unwieldy at high colonist numbers, and when I started building more distant outposts. Job prioritization became a lot harder as well. It’s still properly manageable in Kingdoms and Castles, but their maps are a bit smaller, and it’s a lot easier to keep a proper overview with their top-down perspective. We think Kingdoms-and-Castles-style-logistics will be pretty confusing in Colony Survival, especially when you’re dealing with a larger variety of items over a longer distance.

We're still discussing and testing different ideas, and if anybody can recommend specific systems, we'd love to hear it!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Holy cow, last week's survey resulted in a lot of participation and discussion! The blog now has nearly 100 comments, and the survey is at 888 responses. All of this has been very insightful, so thanks a lot! Like always, we'll share all the results with you.

Nearly all questions asked participants to rate something from 1 to 7, with 1 being "awful" and 7 being "great". The first question was:
[h3]Imagine the "magical stockpile" gets fully removed. All items need to be physically transported from A to B, with a combination of something like delivery men, conveyor belts and trains. How would you rate this change?[/h3]


A vast majority of players rates this change positively, and out of this majority, a large share has picked "7", the most positive option available. This is great to hear, and it's making us more confident in implementing this change.

[h3]We could leave the early game like it is, and constrain "items that need transportation" to later in the game. This means there are "two systems" in the game. What's your opinion?[/h3]


To prevent disappointing players who don't like realistic logistics, we've proposed having two different systems in-game. This was rated rather negatively. In the comments, multiple people suggested making logistics a "toggleable" option. This will probably be difficult to develop, but there might be a great alternative. If logistics gets implemented, we need to assign each item a weight or volume. Hopefully, we could relatively easily make an alternate option where all items have significantly less weight, making them a lot easier to transport.

[h3]We could focus on other features that have less impact on the core gameplay, and reserve the ideas about logistics for a potential sequel. How do you feel about that?[/h3]


The alternative, not implementing logistics in Colony Survival (1), is even more impopular. Good news: we're probably not going to do what this question proposes, and we're very strongly considering to start working on realisitc logistics in CS(1) soon!

[h3]Logistics "inside" colonies could function like they always did, with the "magical stockpile", while trade between colonies receives an overhaul. Here you'll have to build paths between colonies, with tunnels and bridges, and for long distances, safe sleeping places for the travelling colonists. What's your opinion?[/h3]


We're back to more popular proposals! This seems to be a very viable option.
[h3]
The idea above could also be combined with realistic logistics inside of the colony. How do you feel about having both?[/h3]


Yet implementing realistic logistics everywhere gets an even better response. There's one drawback: it's a bit more polarized, with more very excited voters, and simultaneously more participants who rate this suggestion "awful". The amount of votes for "1" went from 27 to 37.

[h3]How do you feel about a feature that allows players to "clear" the world of monsters (but, for example, forcing them to defeat the same amount of monsters at a portal), allowing them to safely expand in a much wider area than just the safe zone?[/h3]


Monsters portals get a more muted response. It's still generally positive, but significantly less compared to the two previous questions. We get it, it's a bit of a strange workaround. We've got some new ideas, but we're not exactly sure how to implement them. Still, we think it would be great if players could use a lot more area in the world, without having to place guards absolutely everywhere.

[h3]What's your opinion about the addition of delivery men as a feature, who bring items from one stack of crates to another?[/h3]


Delivery men get a "regular positive" response. Not extremely excited, but not seriously conflicted either.

[h3]Should these delivery men mainly work automatically (based on the needs of workers), or mainly based on the explicit orders and requests of the player?[/h3]


This was the one exception in the entire survey. Instead of 1 to 7 being 'awful' to 'great', the options here were 1 to 5, representing "Automatically" to "Player controlled". The most popular response is right in the middle, which makes sense. Many systems in the game currently work relatively autonomously, but with the option for the player to intervene. Outside of the most popular response, most participants favor automation above explicit player control.

The last five questions have been combined in one chart. They all ask the same question, about five different subjects.
[h3]What's your opinion about the addition of conveyor belts / trains / ships / zeppelins / pipelines?[/h3]


Up till these questions, no proposal got even close to 400 votes for option 7. But here, both (automated, transport) "trains" and "ships" received 502 votes! It's great to see this amount of enthusiasm :D Conveyor belts and zeppelins received the most "conflicted" response, although it's still largely positive. Ships got the most appreciation. We think this has to do with "timeline issues"; people who feel that more modern tech doesn't fit Colony Survival. A topic for another blog :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Participate in the survey here!

This week, we've been doing a lot of thinking about the plans proposed in last week's Friday Blog. We received a lot of positive replies, and we've gotten more confident in implementing them.

But simultaneously, we've noticed how some of these features are fundamentally linked to other major changes in the game. This would mean that Colony Survival could become a significantly different game than it currently is. Instead of adding new features while not changing the core, these plans could mean that fundamental systems will be radically overhauled.

One of the most significant changes we're considering, is an overhaul to the stockpile and logistics. Currently, the stockpile operates like a 'cloud server'. Miners deep underground 'upload' their items using a nearby crate. Smelters above ground don't have to descend into the mines to gather their ores: they can just 'download' the ores using any random crate.

While this system is easy to operate and pretty intuitive, it also deprives players of a large amount of interesting challenges. Jobs can be placed without much consideration in tall, ugly skyscrapers with no impact on efficiency.

So many interesting things in real life are related to the problem of getting items and people from A to B. Ships, trains, harbors, bridges, tunnels, highways, cars, conveyor belts, elevators. The entire concept of cities is intrinsically linked to the necessity to be physically close to important places.

The “magic stockpile” in Colony Survival deprives players of all of these things. There is no necessity to consider the location of your industries. There is no benefit to building realistic supply chains, like placing your smelters next to your miners. Trading between colonies is purely UI-work, and it doesn’t matter whether there is a huge distance between the colonies or that they’re in sight of each other.

Demanding that items are ‘physically’ transported from one place to another changes all of this. The location of your jobs will have a large impact on the efficiency of your colony. Suddenly, features like (upgradeable) delivery men, trains, conveyor belts and elevators become useful. This gives us a lot of opportunities for the development of interesting new features.



But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It will make the game more complex, and the start of the game becomes more difficult for new players. The update will probably be incompatible with older worlds, or at least it’ll radically change their efficiency. (Older branches of the game are available for download via Steam, meaning it’s always possible to replay old worlds and old versions with a low amount of effort) Colony Survival will become a different game, and some older players will be disappointed. Is this worth it? Should we implement these big changes in Colony Survival, or should we leave the core gameplay intact and reserve these ideas for a potential sequel?

Another big change is linked to realistic logistics. When transportation of items becomes more important and challenging, it makes sense to “open up” a bigger part of the world, to allow the logistics to play out over a larger area. Currently, players are constrained to a relatively small “safe zone” in a huge open world. We’ve been thinking about ways to allow players to make use of a much larger part of the world, without worrying about safe zones and monsters. Imagine a feature that allows players to build a large “monster-portal”. When it’s activated, monsters won’t spawn “in the wild” anymore - they’ll only spawn at the portal and travel to your banner from there. You’ll still need to defeat the same amount of monsters, but you’re free to use a much larger part of the world without caring about safe zones, walls and stationing guards everywhere.

This could allow us to spread different resources around the world more. Currently, all main ores are available everywhere. But imagine having to mine gold and iron at different places, and growing wheat in a third place, and making sure there is proper transportation between all these places - with paths and bridges for travelling colonists, inns along the way to provide a sleeping place, and perhaps automated ships and harbors, perhaps trains!

We’re very excited about this idea, but simultaneously realize what a big change to “standard Colony Survival” this would be. Without the “magic stockpile” and monsters everywhere, it becomes a different game. Is this a game you’re all looking forward to? Do you want this change in this Colony Survival or is it more appropriate for a sequel?

We’d love to have your feedback. As always, we read the comments and our Discord is open for discussion, but we’d also love to have your feedback on the survey!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Survival Lab REC-5, by Littlesproatie

Happy New Year! The start of the week saw the release of 0.8.1. It seems not to have caused significant issues. There was a missing button, but that was fixed in a small patch. We hope the new Job Management Menu will be very useful for all of you!

This blog showcases screenshots from Littlesproatie's Survival Lab REC-5, a survival map with a unique story. It's available on the Workshop! It requires three mods to function, developed by NACH0, Adrenalynn, Kenovis and Boneidle. These are all linked on the Workshop page for the Survival Lab and can be installed easily. Thanks to the creators for building this world and the mods, and have fun building a colony in this futuristic world!

While working on some smaller bugs and fixes, we're thinking of our next big step. What feature should we add? We're discussing a bunch of related ideas. Some have been mentioned before, others not. We'd love to have your feedback. What ideas are you most excited for?

[h3]Support for Longer Crafting Times[/h3]

Currently, 'colonist actions' like crafting and mining cannot take longer than ~15 seconds. This is to prevent colonists getting stuck at their workplace while night falls and monsters are approaching. But this also means no ore can take longer to mine and no item can take longer to craft. This is of course pretty silly and unrealistic, and it leads to workarounds like items having a bunch of costly requirements (lots of copper nails and iron rivets, for example). We hope to add a feature that makes it possible to "subdivide" item crafting: imagine a matchlock gun taking 10 cycles of 15 seconds to craft.

When this has been added, we can immediately alter crafting recipes to make more sense and be less confusing. It also allows us to add new "Colony Points Upgrade Paths", reducing the crafting time of these items. Last but not least, it makes it more worthwhile to add industrial content, with complex machines that can radically speed up your crafting.



[h3]More ways to earn and spend Colony Points[/h3]

Colony Points are still a new feature and could use some more flesh on their bones. We're thinking about for example different tiers of beds that produce a nightly boost to your point income, and the upgrades to crafting efficiency mentioned above.

[h3]Industrial Tech[/h3]

A long held dream of us, we'd love to add a new era to the game, with more modern tech. Players should be able to process oil and generate electricity. Perhaps there'll even be nuclear energy and primitive computers. We're thinking about the best way to implement this: there should be some new mechanics that allow players to make their own designs, with various benefits for different configurations. Simultaneously, these mechanics shouldn't be too difficult too understand.

[h3]Real Logistics[/h3]

Currently, there's a "magical stockpile" that immediately "transports" items from one crate to another. We could make it so that items have to be physically moved from place A to place B. This will force players to rethink the design of their colonies, and could allow for new features like 'delivery colonists', conveyor belts and 'item-elevators'. Perhaps the current content will still use the 'magical stockpile', with new industrial content requiring physical transport. We're still debating the best solution!



[h3]A Mission/Quest-System[/h3]

We lack a decent, in-game tutorial. We'd love to add a system that introduces players to all features, step by step. This should start with small steps like "recruit 4 berry gatherers", and end with missions like "start a colony in the Far East". These missions could have rewards like Colony Points, or be required for specific unlocks. Although the drawback is that this makes the system very essential, and perhaps it should be optional, so more experienced players can disable it. Perhaps there are "repeating missions", like "produce 1000 meals", "survive 10 nights" or "defeat 500 monsters".

[h3]New Guards, new Monsters and Monster Waves[/h3]

There are only a handful of guards and monster types in-game, at the moment. We'd love to add new ones. These could be tied to for example the industrial era. We're also thinking of having special monster waves, that have to be manually activated by the player. These monster waves should be extra difficult, and perhaps have their own special monster types and unique defense mechanics. They should give great rewards to those who manage to defeat them.

[h3]Parallel Worlds[/h3]

Last but not least, but probably least likely of all features mentioned here, are parallel worlds. Imagine a special teleporter at the end of the industrial era, that consumes huge amounts of energy to teleport you to a different world. These other worlds could have wildly different terrain generation, atmospheres or challenges. Your primary colony is required to produce the prerequisites to survive in or support the other worlds. Start a colony on Mars, a radioactive hellhole or a floating paradise!

All of the features mentioned above are rough ideas, not specific plans for 2021. Let us know which one are your favorites and why! If you want to improve an idea, or if you think you've got a better plan, let us know! We read all comments under the blogs, and if you want an active discussion, Discord is the best place. We're online there a lot of the time.

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar :)

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